


(again)

by irfire



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Book: Harrow the Ninth (Locked Tomb Trilogy), F/F, Gideon is in the river, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), and dies a few more times, and finds her necromancer, as if the end of HtN was not angsty enough
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:02:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28373580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irfire/pseuds/irfire
Summary: Okay, breathing. She was breathing. The nausea sat back on its haunches in the pit of Harrow’s stomach and Gideon tried to stand shakily. Harrow’s limbs were short and weak and painfully not Gideon’s. It had been hard enough to walk with her legs in the Mithraeum but there had been a lifetime's worth of adrenaline and murder wasps keeping her upright.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 2
Kudos: 34





	(again)

Gideon had lived and somehow managed to keep Harrow’s tenuous mess of bone and tendons in one piece. She had taken them both into the roaring surging pressure of the river rather than get crushed like a can in the Mithraeum as it was broken down into scrap parts. The memories were disorganized, a tangle of drowning and dying and watching her royal fuckup the princess of Ida drag that miserable man god out of a riverbed of tongues and teeth ready to have him for supper. She would have much rather Ianthe let the man who became god become lunch rather than her insufferable cavalier. Too bad. 

She tumbled and tumbled and tumbled. She was sure she died a couple times, her spirit and Harrow’s body working double time to keep them, whatever they were at this point, alive. Gideon poured out into the river. A soul in the river is always desperate to find its still living body somewhere on the shore. A soul in the river already inside a living body, but still desperately looking for its sick ass biceps on the bank, will rush through rapids and tides and eddies too lost and senseless to be confused. 

It could have been a myriad. An eternity of playing Little Mermaid amongst 10,000 years worth of death. The river took and took, twisted time in stacks up over itself. Time was a fleshy thing and disintegrated in the inhuman flow of the river. It broke up into its constituent parts, a moment here, a week there, the blink of an eye, the slow enunciation of a broken syllable, a year gone. A decade. A lyctor’s lifetime.

And the original inhabitant of this poorly cared for, train-wreck of a human body? Where was she? The thought drifted past Gideons eyes, sucked into her barely-still-there-lungs over and over. A loose memory flickered in the back of her mind, screaming soundlessly amidst the ghosts of the river, “Where the hell are you? Get the fuck back here!” Soundless and repetitive. She wanted to scratch at the bony chest of this body, wake Harrow up from wherever she was on fucking vacation, but she couldn’t even touch herself in the current. Her hands knocked out of the way, an endless parade of broken pieces getting between hands and body.

Gideon gasped as her head finally broke the surface. How long did she tread water, breath ragged and sputtering, expelling an invisible tide out of her lungs? She couldn’t feel Harrow’s body around her, dragging herself onto a rocky outcropping. This was solid ground? Was she still in the river? After an eon of lying and sucking in whatever approximation of air this was, she sat up. Harrow’s abs burned like she’d been swimming for a decade straight.

Behind her was a short, uphill rocky path gnarled in black jagged edges. It led to a door that pointed downwards into the rock. A shiver ran from Gideon’s scalp down to her toes. She knew that door. It had goth skull cultist vibes practically radiating out of it. The shiver seemed to wake bits of Harrow’s body, a wave of nausea crashing down and she was propelled forward, dry heaving on her hands and knees. Nothing came up. Or, what looked like nothing but felt like the invisible liquid of the river, thick with the guts of ghosts. 

Okay, breathing. She was breathing. The nausea sat back on its haunches in the pit of Harrow’s stomach and Gideon tried to stand shakily. Harrow’s limbs were short and weak and painfully _not_ Gideon’s. It had been hard enough to walk with her legs in the Mithraeum but there had been a lifetime's worth of adrenaline and murder wasps keeping her upright. Eventually she managed to quell the shaking enough to move, slowly and unsteadily up the path. It would have been embarrassing to watch, but luckily nobody was here except Gideon, half of Harrow, and the seething tides of death that surged around the edges of the rock. Nobody would rat her out for currently being a five foot nothing goth girl shuddering her way up towards a door that looked like it went to hell. Really not her normal vibe, but whatever. When in a river filled with death do as weird skinny necromancers do. 

What would have normally been a short walk up to the door took somewhere between ten minutes and two hours. Hard to tell out here in this little slice of hell. Gideon had to stop every few steps and sit, or dry heave, or just shake for a while. Eventually she managed to drag Harrow up the final step to stand in front of the door. Everyone who ever accused her of not being a traditional ninth house cavalier could totally suck it, she had just dragged a shaky skinny bag of bones around for the sake of her adept. Wall her up in the Anestasian monument now, she was exactly the ninth’s kind of hero. 

Looking at the massive black expanse of door, she was struck by the familiarity but couldn’t quite place it. Closing her eyes, she breathed in and was surrounded with the familiar stale damp scent of Drearbruh. The water of the river was gone, replaced by the methodical clicking of skeletons harvesting snow leeks. She was a child in the bowels of the literal worst place in the whole hot and stupid universe, somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be and - her eyes blinked open. The door was Harrow’s door. The door to her child sized cell in the heart of Drearbruh. 

There was no doorknob but when Gideon pressed Harrow’s hand against it, the door swung quietly open. Glancing behind her only yielded the same rocky, messy, river filled view as before. She took a deep breath, shrugged Harrow’s bony little shoulders, and took her first step down the stairwell that stretched out from the open door. Okay, well, she’d probably made worse choices. 

She took the dark steep stairs slowly downwards. Luckily, if there was one thing Harrow’s body knew how to do it was climb down dark and foreboding stairs into the pits of her beloved bone church. Gideon took it slowly, leaning against the rough narrow walls for support. If you’d told her as a kid that hell was just more long foreboding Drearbruh steps she would have believed you. 

Eventually she reached a landing and stood to face a rock that, well, it appeared it had already been rolled away. Gideon assumed she had been cold for a long time flopping around in the river, but it hit her all at once. A thick blanket of chill descended over her shoulders. This was the tomb? This was the river’s approximation of the tomb? Harrow’s recollection of the tomb? Some upsettingly depressing combination of all of the above? Either way, the rock had been rolled away and Gideon was standing at the entrance. She couldn’t help the irony that wormed its way in, this was such a hilariously misinterpreted bastardization of the exact reason she’d been born. 

Gideon hesitated for only a moment before she squeezed Harrow’s thin figure through the crack between the rock and the archway. For the first time since she’d woken up with a fucking rapier in the gut she was thankful to be in this small body instead of her much stronger body that actually worked out once in a while.

She walked into a chamber filled with water. Another step further and she would have been ankle deep in the murky black waters that glowed a soft and horrible green. Her eyes in Harrow’s face adjusted to the dimly lit room, and upon looking up she saw a cathedral ceiling studded with a dismal heaven of luminescent worms reflecting down on the waters below them. Across the water there was a black mausoleum made of glass, also reflecting that horrid green glow. Something deep in her gut knew what was in that tomb and her whole body lit up as the knowledge burrowed its way into her limbs.

Gideon took a deep breath and suddenly Harrow’s body moved of its own volition and she was in the water. It felt like she was on a fishing line being dragged to the sordid tomb in this awful recreation of a horrible place that nobody was ever supposed to see again. 

When she surfaced again Harrow’s body hauled them up onto the shore and shuddered. There was no fat on literally any part of her, and the cold had a one way ticket to her bones. Entering under the arch of the mausoleum Harrow’s body walked her down a winding pathway until she arrived at what could have only been The Tomb. Harrowhark Nonagesimus former Reverend Daughter, hand and gesture of the shitty god-dad-king undying lay there, tangled up and spooning her sword, _her sword her fucking sword._ Next to her on a bed of ice and glass was a crumpled magazine, _Frontline Titties of the Fifth_ , which she almost smiled at. Not even a real magazine. In this terrible viciously cold cathedral of ancient death Harrow had dragged evidence of Gideon in with her. Evidence that she’d listened to her, remembered her. 

“Harrow?” Gideon croaked. She had meant to be louder but she honestly had no idea how long it had been since she’d used these vocal cords. Harrow’s body surged forward without her asking it to, towards its mirror image snoozing with a six foot two hander - at least a foot longer than she was. 

“Harrow!” She was louder now, hand reaching out towards Harrow’s cold and exceedingly still shoulder. “Wake up, Harrow, I’m here. I fucking found you.”

When her hand, when Harrow’s hand, touched the image of Harrow in front of her a blast of heat raged through her body. It ran like a circuit breaking through her fingers up to her elbow and shoulder and then coursing through the rest of her body. Distantly, Gideon heard herself cry out with Harrow’s voice and stagger forward towards the coffin. Harrow stirred on the death bed in front of her. Her face looked like she’d finally slept, maybe for the first time Gideon had ever seen. Her hair was cropped short like it was before they got on the shuttle to Canaan House. 

A fire pressed its way through every inch of Harrow’s body and in spite of herself Gideon felt Harrow’s hand reach out to the cheek of the woman in front of her. She gasped as Harrow’s eyes opened, big and black and wide as they blinked up at her. She stared, confused for a moment that stretched out endlessly as Gideon burned from the inside out. 

“Gideon?” Her voice was so quiet, Gideon was hardly sure she’d heard it except for seeing Harrow’s lips move. 

“I kept the homefires burning hun, but I think it’s time for you to come back.” She knew what the heat was, rushing through her like a forest fire. Harrow’s body wanted her soul back. 

Harrow struggled to sit up as Gideon shuddered forward, almost landing on the platform with her. She braced herself on the edge, leaning back and resting against the cold stone, “You’re not supposed to be here.” 

Gideon hissed out an angry laugh as her soul, she assumed, was being fed into the furnace of Harrow’s body. “Thanks for the welcome home, really appreciate all the pomp and circumstance. Parade is a nice touch.” 

“No, Gideon, I -- I haven’t figured it out yet. I haven’t figured out how to get you out of there yet.” 

“Harrow listen, I’ve already died for you. I did it. I jumped on that fence and cracked open for you --”  
  
“You were murdered!” Harrow cried out, seized by her grief and terror. It was only three days ago (was it?) she’d watched Gideon die in front of her. Now she was here, in front of her, towing Harrow’s body along. Gideon’s eyes glimmered out from Harrow’s sharp narrow face, light brown skin still dripping water.

“Yeah, but I decided how I went. What other fucking decisions have I had, huh? I guess I didn’t kick Crux down those stairs but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count.” She sighed, this wasn’t the conversation she came here to have. Her voice, gritty with pain went quiet and soft. 

Gideon reached out and ran a thumb down Harrow’s cheek, “But there’s no point fighting about it. At this point, what’s done is done and your body is in the process of choking me down like a hot snack.” 

Harrow looked at Gideon, at her own body, with a desperate panic. Her hand flew up to her face, feeling the softness of her own hand under Gideon’s control. She looked at Gideon’s eyes and leaned forward, bits of ice falling off her back. “Gideon, I -” 

Gideon closed her eyes, suddenly gripped by snug, warm exhaustion like she had never felt before in the freezing dark tunnels of Drearbruh. When she opened them again Harrow was up close to Gideon’s face, her hands on either cheek. Take two with this whole death thing. This time, even as the thick sleepiness lured her back under, she leaned forward and pressed her lips against Harrow’s.  
  
“One flesh, one end babe.” Harrow’s hands held her and she died (again). 

=== 

When Gideon blinked her eyes open there she was, Harrow’s dead corpse of a girlfriend, yellow eyes boring into her. Before she could wonder what the fuck was happening she heard a voice two times removed from that unearthly face in front of her, “Chest compressions. I know her sternum’s shattered; ignore it. We need that heart pumping. On my mark.”

Hands pressed. Gideon died (again, again).


End file.
